Video Games Live comes to London and Manchester – Tommy Tallarico interview

The world’s most successful video game concert is coming back to the UK, as GC speaks to its host and gaming’s most prolific music composer.

It was six years ago that we and hundreds of others attended the last Video Games Live concert in London, and now the globe-hopping show is finally coming back to Britain. And for the first time it’ll also be performing in Manchester, with a show scheduled for November 1 before its return to London on November 2.

Unlike other concerts Video Games Live takes in the whole history of video game music, from the 8-bit era to some games that haven’t even been released yet. Its first performance was in 2002 and it has now clocked up over 300 shows in 30 countries, for an audience of over 1 million people. And that includes a record-breaking show in China that was attended by 100,000 fans.

If you’re not convinced though we got to chat at length with Video Games Live’s co-founder and host Tommy Tallarico, who already has a long and storied history as a video game music composer. Over the last 25 years he’s worked on more than 250 games ranging from Earthworm Jim and Prince Of Persia to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Advent Rising.

We managed to get him talking about more than just game music though, including his thoughts on the movie industry and innovation and storytelling in gaming. And on top of all that a childhood-ruining revelation about Star Wars (that doesn’t even have anything to do with the prequels).

GC: I have to say it doesn’t feel like six years ago I was at the last London show, but can you give me just a quick idea of what will have changed this time around?

TT: Sure. Every year we change the show, we change the material in the show. So the folks that saw the show in 2007, 2008, or 2009 are getting a whole new set list. We might keep one or two of the favourites but we get the audience to help us create the set list on our Facebook page. We’ll have a Facebook events page for London or Manchester or wherever the show is. And we say, ‘Hey, tell us what you want to hear!’ The show’s for them, not for me.

And so we’re going to bringing a lot of new material that the people haven’t heard before. We got more video screens now, we got more HD cameras, there’s little technology things like that but I think the thing that people will be most interested in knowing is that it is a new set list and a new show.

GC: When you go to different countries do you vary the options you offer them? When you talk about video game music a lot of British gamers will immediately think of people like Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway before any NES or even 16-bit game. But I’m guessing most people in the US won’t even know who they are?

TT: Well, the hardcore gamers in the US definitely know Rob.

GC: He was working out there for a while, wasn’t he?

TT: That’s right, yeah, he was working for EA I think at one point. But yes, from country to country it is very different and just… I’ll give you an example, like when we play in the Middle East, in Dubai… Dubai has really only been around for 10 or 15 years so the gamers there who are in Dubai, they never grew up with a Commodore 64 or a NES or a Sega Mega Drive. Their gaming knowledge is all from the PlayStation 2 and beyond, so they’re huge fans of Metal Gear Solid and God Of War and Halo and all of the modern stuff. So the Marios and the Zeldas and the Castlevanias don’t really mean much to them.

The same thing in South America, and again I think it’s because of the financial climate over the last 20 or 30 years there, but again not a lot of people had 8-bit Nintendos or even Super Nintendos or Genesis… Mega Drive growing up. So they were the PlayStation generation. And then you go to places like Japan and China, which are completely insane. In China they love PC games: Starcraft, Legaue Of Legends, Warcraft, Dota 2… everything to do with those games China is all about. And yet right next door in Japan no one has PCs, or rather they don’t play games on them.

But I would say that the Brits are definitely closer to the US, in terms of most of the gamers did grow up loving Mario and Zelda. Like everything it’s a wide variety but definitely some of the new stuff we are bringing, some of the classic stuff that we never played back then that we’ve since done new arrangements of, are things like Monkey Island, which I know is popular over there; a game I worked on called Earthworm Jim was popular there in the early ’90s; things like Mega Man and Street Fighter II.

As well as brand new stuff we even have stuff now that we’re planning that hasn’t even been released yet, so one of the big ones we’re bringing over there that hasn’t been released is Bungie Studio’s Destiny and the music was written by the composer Marty O’Donnell and Sir Paul McCartney. So a Beatle is now writing video game music and we’re performing that in the show even before the game is released! [This was before the shock news of O’Donnell’s exit from Bungie – GC]

So we gotta do that one in England because of the connection. But yeah, you’re absolutely right: different areas love different things. I’ve created over 125 segments for the show, over the last 12 years of doing it, and we only get to play about 18 of them a night and the reality is that it’s been four of five years since we’ve been back to London so we’re raring to go with a brand new show.

Tommy probably also plays a mean pinball

GC: That sounds great. But just hypothetically at least how would using a Rob Hubbard piece work? You wouldn’t play the original chiptune would you, it’d be an orchestral arrangement?

TT: Yeah, I mean Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, they were all originally chiptunes. Street Fighter not so much, it was FM synthesis, but in regardless to bleeps and bloops even Tetris… I mean we have this Tetris opera that we do that’s unbelievable, so you hear the old [hums the original Tetris theme tune] and then we’re playing it with the full orchestra, choir, singing in Russian, and opera soloist.

I mean it’s… they’re more challenging to do those type of songs, but they’re definitely more fun and more enjoyable for the audience because they’re hearing them in this manner, in this orchestration and arrangement, for the very first time. And they’re hearing it live and they know the melodies from their head but to hear it fully performed and fully realised is always an exciting thing. Because you play Halo and you’ve heard that music a hundred times in the game, but the Tetris opera or a rock ‘n’ roll version of Street Fighter II with guitars and the symphony playing along – those are the ones the crowd likes the most.

And when you do an arrangement… the hardest part about composing is the melody. Whether it’s Beethoven [hums a few bars of his Symphony No. 9], that motif, that melody is the most difficult thing. Being a game composer myself for 25 years, that’s the thing I want to focus on the most is how can I get that hook. The great thing about doing chiptune music and arranging and orchestrating it is that the hardest part is already done. And so taking those melodies and just attaching them to the instruments and coming up with really cool arrangements and orchestrations that’s kind of the fun part. And I wouldn’t even consider it challenging as much as it is fun!

GC: You clearly love your work, but just to be a sourpuss for a second you must have heard complaints from people before that modern video game music is much less memorable than it used to be. It’s of a very high quality, but beyond Halo and Metal Gear Solid I don’t think there’s any I’d be able to hum immediately if someone asked. I mean something like Assassin’s Creed might have good music, but I don’t remember it all once I’m out of the game.

TT: Yeah, it’s like every movie nowadays. [laughs]

GC: Well, exactly.

TT: [laughs] And I’ll tell you why that is. Here’s the thing: there is some excellent modern video game music. You mentioned two of ’em, Metal Gear and Halo, and there’s other things like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy that have some very memorable, call them hummable, tunes. Even things like God Of War might be put in that category, but Skyrim is an amazing melodic soundtrack that a lot of gamers know. But I totally understand and agree with your point.

The reason for that is 25 years ago, when guys like me and Rob Hubbard were composing music we had so much limited space and limited technology and limited time and limited budget and limited limited everything that you only had… take a game like Sonic The Hedgehog. Those are 45 second loops, ’cause you didn’t have time to do three minute MIDI chiptunes, you had 45 seconds. So your melody was everything, and because it was going to be repeated a thousand times you put all of your focus into that melody that had to be repeated over and over and over again.

Nowadays, because of the big production and the big budgets people sometimes seem to spend more time on the production side as opposed to the melody. And that’s one thing when I approach a game. I always go back to when I was in my little loft 25 yeas ago, I don’t care if I’m writing for an orchestra or not I wanted to keep it simple and melodic. That’s how you start and from there it can go in different directions. Now that being said as well, I’m 46 years old so I kinda grew up on video-gaming and I remember the old days very well and as we grow older we tend to remember all the great stuff.

The reality is though is that there was a lot more s**** back then but we just don’t remember that, so nowadays we can pick out five or six great modern things and it’s easy to say because we’re inundated with it now that, ‘Boy, there’s a lot of non-memorable stuff’. But the reality is that 25 years ago it was actually the same. [laughs] We had Mario, Zelda, Tetris, Castlevania, but there’s a lot of c*** too, we just don’t remember it as much.

Tetris: The Opera

GC: You’re right of course. But I remember an interesting interview I did a couple of years ago with the composer for an orchestral compilation here called The Greatest Video Game Music 2.

TT: I know it, I don’t know the guy’s name, but they had my music from Advent Rising on the first one.

GC: That’s it, they did. He said, and it was interesting to me that you kept mentioning melody a moment ago, but he said one of the problems with game composers is they’re copying what’s fashionable in movies. And what’s fashionable in movies at the moment is Hans Zimmer, who really isn’t one for melodies.

TT: The first thing is that a lot of my film composer friends, big film composer friends – names you’d know – they’re actually saying to me, ‘You know it’s funny, because all of these new directors and film makers who are now in their 40s and grew up on video games. The film industry is now asking the film composers, ‘Hey, can you get it to sound like Halo!’ So that’s one interesting thing, because young film guys that’s what they grew up on, but the direct answer to your question is that that isn’t the composers who want to do that.

Unfortunately a lot of times the way video game publishers and developers work is that they get something in their playlist, on their iPod or whatever, and they want their composer to make it sound just like that. And I’ll tell you the exact people, it’s either Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, or John Williams. At one point 10 years ago everyone was asking to sound like The Matrix. ‘Oh yeah The Matrix is such a great thing!’ And even the film industry rips itself off all the time. When Inception came out…

GC: Oh god, those bloody Inception horns!

TT: [laughs] Right, right! Everybody had to do that! And so I think that’s just the nature of the entertainment industry. But make no mistake, us composers get together and bitch about it all the time. And make no mistake it is not the game composers, it’s the game designers and game producers who… everybody temps in stuff. Even the great John Williams, when he got on Star Wars George Lucas had the whole movie temped out.

TT: Well, there’s that yes [hums a few bars of Mars] that’s part of that. But if you really want to blow your freakin’ mind go on YouTube and put in Kings Row, it was a 1941 Ronald Regan movie, and look up the main theme from Kings Row.

GC: Is that the one he based the Tatooine theme on? Because I have heard that before.

TT: Oh, no. This is actually the main theme from Star Wars. [hums the Kings Row main theme] One note goes down at the end and that’s it…

GC: The only thing worse than that is something else from that interview actually, where he’s quoting a director saying ‘I want something more general, I don’t want something so emotional, I want something more neutral.’ That’s just the worst thing I’ve ever heard a creative person say.

TT: [sounding depressed] Yeah, well that’s because a lot of the game producers are younger people who a lot of them don’t have a storytelling background, they’re hardcore gamers.

GC: Frankly, I think your point about the game-influenced directors asking for something more interesting speaks very well of games, because it shows they’re still interested in a good melody.

TT: I’ll tell you a cool story about Video Games Live that I think really says a lot. A couple of years ago I was backstage at a show. The show was about to begin and this woman who was playing in the orchestra, I think she was playing oboe, and it was a very prestigious orchestra and she came up to me and she has tears in her eyes. And she says to me, ‘Look, I got to tell you. I’ve been playing in this orchestra for over 25 years and I’ve a 17-year-old son and I’ve been trying to get my son to come see his mom play for the last 15 years and he just will not do it. He just has no interest…’

And then tears literally started streaming down her cheeks and she says, ‘Until tonight. Not only is my son here tonight to see his mom play for the very first time but he’s brought all his friends and all he’s been doing in school the last month is bragging to everybody about how his mom’s going to be playing Warcraft and Halo tonight’. She’s like, ‘Thank you so much!’

Those are the kind of stories that you never… when I first created this thing you never think of that kind of thing happening. Or the letters we get from parents after the shows, saying, ‘My eight-year-old daughter went to the show last night, it was wonderful, we were able to follow along. But we just wanted to let you know that around breakfast my daughter said, ‘Mom, I want to start taking violin lessons so I can learn the music to Zelda and Kingdom Hearts’.

And those are real stories, talking about John Williams and Star Wars, that’s how I got involved in orchestra music… through pop culture. When I was 10-years-old it was 1977 and Star Wars came out. And when I heard that music and heard that orchestra that’s what got me interested in orchestral music. We didn’t have the Internet back then so I went down to the library and started reading these interviews and articles about this John Williams guy and he would talk about Beethoven and Mozart and then I’d go and rent a record from the library about who’s this Beethoven guy? And when I heard Beethoven for the first time the first thing that popped into my head was, ‘Hey, this is the music from Bugs Bunny!’

And so because of pop culture, because of cartoons and a sci-fi film that got me interested in classic musical. We’re seeing the exact same thing happening now, 30 years later, with video games. People are getting more involved and understanding music, and appreciating the art and culture of symphonic music because of video games. And I think that’s a pretty darn cool thing, and it was mostly really the reason I created Video Games Live in the first place.

GC: So are you working on any new soundtracks yourself at the moment?

TT: I don’t have any time to work on anything at the moment…

GC: I was wondering, what with the 125 arrangements and everything. But do you miss it?

TT: I tell you I don’t. And here’s why [laughs]. Every composer, they do what they do because they want people to hear their music, right? They don’t just do it for the money. People do it because they love composing and the end goal of any composer is to have as many people as possible hear their music. But the reality is that no composer ever really gets that enjoyment, because they sit in their studios till four in the morning, all by themselves in a dark room, they pour out their souls into this thing and then they send it off on a hard drive and it’s like sending out a little bottle in the ocean.

And then you never know who’s gonna hear it or if they enjoy it… maybe they buy a bunch of albums and you win an award or something but you never feel the people, right? And John Williams and Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer could all walk down the street and not a single person would recognise them, right? [laughs] But doing live music… as a composer being able to perform and get that instant feedback and get that energy and excitement from the crowd I think that’s what all musicians and composers deep down long for. So for me, composing video game music for 20 years, working on over 300 games – I have a Guinness World Record for the person that’s work on the most video games in their life – I got my fill, but now this is what really excites me more than anything.

And every once in a while I’ll come out of retirement… the folks at Sega, I was the very first American ever to work on Sonic The Hedgehog. And with a Brit Richard Jacques too… so that was an honour. I was only able to do two or three songs but every once in a while I might do something, but this is my passion and bringing it to the people live, and seeing the reactions live, that’s every composer’s dream I think.

Video Games Live – interactive music

GC: I think the reason I got upset at the suggested influence of Hans Zimmer is I don’t ever like to see video games playing second fiddle to movies.

TT: Exactly.

GC: I always think the parallels between the two mediums are overstated. And I’d hate to see video game music, which you more than anyone knows has such a rich, distinctive history, devolve into something indistinguishable from the average movie soundtrack.

TT: Absolutely. I’ll tell you the thing that makes video game music, and Video Games Live, so unique and why it’s so important to people – and it’s the only music in the world that does this – but when you play a video game and you become that character the music becomes the soundtrack to your life. It’s much more personal, it’s much more emotional. And this is what I try to tell these producers when they’re trying to make it sound like John Williams or Hans Zimmer or whatever, but when you become that character it’s much more personal.

Like when you watch Avatar: great movie, great graphics, great story, great sound, blah, blah. Okay, but hum me the music to Avatar. Because you’re watching someone else’s story it doesn’t connect with you personally. Whereas, when you’re battling somebody and it’s you with that sword in your hand and you’re battling to save your village and there’s a hundred guys on horseback and that music is playing that is your call to battle. That becomes a part of you. And when you win and it plays that victory song that is your thing, that’s for you.

And the reality is it’s being played a hundred times in a row, so it gets drilled into your brain. [laughs] When you watch a film like Avatar you hear maybe an hour and a half worth of music, 80 per cent of which is talked over and then maybe six months later you get the Blu-ray and you watch it again and then you’re done. And so in a whole year you’ve heard maybe three hours worth of Avatar music, 80 per cent of which you kind of didn’t hear because it was underneath stuff. Whereas in video games it’s the exact opposite, you take a game like Warcraft or Halo people are playing 30 or 40 hours a week and the music becomes a part of you and it’s getting blasted into your head.

Think about it, and maybe you experienced it at Video Games Live when you went, when you hear our show and you hear that Zelda theme or something it might have taken you right back to that first time when you played the game, sitting around the living room with your mom and dad or whatever. So it brings back so many memories because you heard it so much and it was so ingrained into your brain.

And just one last comment about the film and video games industry, which I think you’ll find interesting. When films first came out in the 19-teens and twenties they weren’t universal. Everybody didn’t just go, ‘Oh okay, everybody we’re going to the movies now’. In fact it was exactly the opposite, where all the old people were like, ‘What the hell is this garbage?’ There’s no sound, there’s no colour, the acting’s terrible, there’s no story, this is b******* vaudeville’s where it’s at, this is c***!’

But then the film industry got sound and then it got colour, and then it wasn’t until 1939 Wizard of Oz comes out with colour. Then you’ve got in the ’40s you start to get some stories with Gone with the Wind and then it wasn’t until the ’60s and ’70s that The Graduate and The Godfather where you got real acting. And so it took the film industry 40 years and then what happened is that all the kids in the ’20s then grew up on film and it eventually evolved into the culture. But it took film a long time to get there.

Well, isn’t it interesting? 1972: Pong, black and white, no story, no sound and then we got colour, and then we got sound, and then in the late ’90s we started to get proper storylines and now we got acting and serious storylines now. And isn’t it odd, it’s about 40 years later now. And now a whole generation of people like myself who grew up knowing nothing other than video games, they were just a part of culture. And then our generation is starting to have kids and grandkids and that’s when it’s going to be fully a part of culture.

So it’s interesting to compare Hollywood and games in that sense, ’cause I think there’s a lot of parallels there, but the exciting and interesting about that comparison I think is that video games right now are about where Gone with the Wind was for the film industry. So we haven’t even hit our Star Wars yet. So that’s the exciting thing that it keeps growing, the music’s going to get more important.

Hollywood was kind of laughed out of the video games industry in the mid ’90s, right? With games like Night Trap and it was just awful. And even the hardcore gamer whenever there’s a game where Hollywood is involved they’re kind of like,’Eww, yuck!’ So more producers and designers need to start understanding that so that they kind of shy away. Now there’s obviously a lot of positive things we can take from Hollywood: costume design, storytelling, there’s a lot of great positive things, I don’t want to shun Hollywood because they are the master storytellers over the years – but now you’re starting to see those scriptwriters all doing video games. You’re seeing movie composers doing video games too, so it is starting to cross-pollinate a little bit.

But the most successful titles are always the ones that are breaking free, that are doing their own thing, that are doing something that nobody’s ever done before and not following the same old story. And that’s the great thing about all the cellphone and the mobile gaming is that it’s back like when I first started 25 years ago when it was just five people in a room making a game together. And there’s no big corporation over your shoulder, some producer telling you to take this or that out, or make it sound like Hans Zimmer. You don’t get that in the mobile world and that’s where all the amazing, great cool new ideas are sprouting from.

So hopefully that generation of people, when they start making their AAA titles they’ll bring that with them. And with crowd-funding the way it is now you can tell the game publishers a big FU. So it’s gonna be really interesting to see some of these games where the complete control is put right in the game designer’s hand from start to finish, we’ll see how that works out. The jury’s still out but I think it’s a lot more exciting than Madden 52 or Splinter Cell 18. [laughs]

Video Games Live – the music of your gaming life

GC: [laughs] You’re barely joking about those numbers. It must be at least seven or eight for Splinter Cell.

TT: I was on the first Tony Hawk’s game, I did all the audio and everything, and there were like 15 of us that worked on the game. And when we were working on it none of us knew it was going to be this massive thing. Activision themselves thought they were going to sell 250,000 units. Well, on the PlayStation alone we sold over 20 million units, and then of course they started porting it out on this and that. And then they came out with it year after year. I got out of it after two, but every year they just beat it into the ground.

It’s the same thing why Rock Band and Guitar Hero failed, there were two or three products a year. C’mon, breath a little! How about every two or three years? Make people want it and anticipate it, not flood the market with a million of these things. Guitar Hero I think will be back, but it’s going to take five or so years and the new platforms and some new hook to bring it back. But boy, what a ride that was for while. But the game publishers just oversaturated it…

GC: Don’t get me started on that subject.

TT: [laughs]

GC: I just don’t understand how they can be short-sighted. And what gets me is they’re so desperate to copy successful games, they’ll clone GTA a hundred times and yet the only thing they won’t take from it is the fact that it only comes out every three or four years. Why is that the one thing you’re not copying? Don’t you see how important it is to make it a good game and to make sure people don’t get sick of the concept.

TT: [laughs] You mean you’re not tired of zombie-killing games?

GC: Zombies… if I have to kill one more…

TT: Or a sci-fi first person shooter.

GC: Well, the worst thing is they now almost seem original simply because for the last few years they were the thing that was being copied the least!

TT: [laughs] It’s funny and that’s why I love mobile gaming so much, because it’s being done by people that don’t have bosses, but the best thing is they’re simple. I mean I can’t sit my dad down and jump into a game of Halo, you’ve gotta be a f***** camera operator in order to try and figure out the controls.

Or even Madden football, it’s impossible for somebody… and that’s why I love something like Shadow Of The Colossus. It’s a completely original concept with one joystick button… look they know what you wanna do… it’s like some of the Lara Croft games where you have to be pixel perfect with your jumping. You know what I wanna do just do it!

GC: [laughs] Well, thank you so much for that. And hopefully we can meet up when you’re in London.

TT: Absolutely, let the PR guys know and hopefully I’ll see you in November.